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Another reason on McCain
admin
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Susan Crawford blog
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2008-06-04
About ten days ago, I was a co-moderator (with Ari Schwartz) of a panel at CFP during which surrogates for the Obama and McCain campaigns had a civil and well-informed conversation about tech policy. I was impressed by Chuck Fish, the McCain representative, who did his best to win the respect of the geek [...] |
VZ open development initiative
admin
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Susan Crawford blog
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2008-06-03
Verizon’s Open Development Initiative may end up being a breakthrough for device manufacturers. As usual, the devil is in the details, and we don’t even have the details to dig through yet. But at least the outlines of the project sound encouraging. As it was explained to me, the idea is to be more open to [...] |
OECD releases Economics of Malware study co-authored by van Eeten
Brenden Kuerbis
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IGP Blog
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2008-06-02
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Futurama
admin
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Susan Crawford blog
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2008-05-30
Saul Hansell writes today about Comcast’s “Fancast” service, which is aimed at making it easier to find high-priced content that is being distributed through tightly-controlled windows (e.g., in the theaters, heading to video, being broadcast on cable). In the future, Fancast wants to tie platforms together: If you see video on the Web that’s not on cable [...] |
Financial models for “difficult” journalism
Ethan
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...My heart's in Accra
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2008-05-30
One of the themes I was struck by at the Berkman at Ten conference was the idea that the net is now mature enough that we should be studying what’s actually happening, not just what we think should happen. While that doesn’t sound like that much of a breakthrough, it’s useful to me, at least, [...] |
Why we pay attention to Darfur
Ethan
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...My heart's in Accra
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2008-05-29
I’d hoped that spending three weeks offline would be a great time for ideas to ferment, much as they do when I’m on vacation. Turns out that this healing thing is harder work than I’d anticipated. Rather than a wealth of insights to write about, I’ve mostly got a backlog of unanswered research questions that [...] |
“Well, the FCC issued a regulation”
admin
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Susan Crawford blog
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2008-05-28
And so even though the DC Circuit said the FCC didn’t have the jurisdiction to adopt that regulation, and Congress hasn’t acted to change that conclusion, Microsoft still apparently thinks its Media Center should acknowledge broadcast flags - preventing users from copying over-the-air digital broadcasts. [DC Circuit to FCC: Back Off, from the summer of 2005, [...] |
Information/communications services
admin
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Susan Crawford blog
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2008-05-27
Congress and the Federal Communications Commission have divided all communications using wires or radio waves into two categories: telecommunications services or information services. Telecommunications services are defined as “basic” transmission services in which there is no “protocol conversion” or re-stating of the communication in a different technical form. Telecommunications services are subject to “common carriage” regulation, [...] |
Skype, M2Z, and termination fees
admin
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Susan Crawford blog
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2008-05-23
All being discussed at the FCC June 12 meeting, according to this report. Here’s what may happen: the Skype petition will be denied, more spectrum may be suggested for auction (on the condition that some of it be made available for free wireless use - relates to the M2Z plan that was rejected by the Commission), [...] |
The biggest surveillance story in years
admin
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Susan Crawford blog
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2008-05-22
To very little uproar - that’s the problem - the UK is considering floating a bill that would centralize all data collected by ISPs. Can you imagine this? The UK has had data retention laws since October 2007 that require phone companies to hang onto phone and text records, and this next step would make all [...] |
Structural separation
admin
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Susan Crawford blog
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2008-05-20
I’ve been spending a lot of time with the 1956 At&T consent decree that was so disliked by Ma Bell. The incumbent disliked it because it commanded that AT&T act only as a common carrier - no other functions allowed. (It doesn’t say anything about precluding AT&T from using electronics in its network when it [...] |
Berkeley China Internet Project
Sharon Black (noreply@blogger.com)
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CommPilings
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2008-05-19
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The mashable wiki
admin
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Susan Crawford blog
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2008-05-16
Wikis are extraordinarily useful but essentially flat resources. It’s tough to conceive of a wiki being made up of structured data; indeed, a key concept behind wiki-ness is that anyone can edit and make the wiki wiser, and we don’t force people to edit in particular ways. So a wiki is just there, [...] |
D stands for slightly desperate
admin
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Susan Crawford blog
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2008-05-15
The FCC released a notice yesterday asking many questions - they boil down to something like “How on earth do we go on with the idea of a public-private partnership for the D Block?” Here’s the background: As part of the structure of the 700 MHz auction that concluded recently, the Commission proposed that the licensee [...] |
Hitting the nails on the head in Canada
admin
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Susan Crawford blog
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2008-05-14
In The Deal of the Century, the 1987 classic account by Steve Coll of the breakup of the Bell System, one of the Bell local operating company presidents (pre-breakup) is furious about MCI’s attempts to build microwave private lines for companies. Here he is, arguing to the AT&T chairman that MCI has to be [...] |
The U.S. Congress and “free speech principles on the Internet” [cough]
Milton Mueller
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IGP Blog
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2008-05-11
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top ten things lawyers should know about Internet research: #8
webmaster
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According to the Best Available Data
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2008-05-10
[beginning of top ten list] #8: The opaqueness of the infrastructure to empirical analysis has generated many problematic responses from rigidly circumscribed communities earnestly trying to get their jobs done. To its credit, the IETF acknowledged and endeavored to solve the technical limitations of the current IPv4 protocol, primarily the insufficient number of addresses and [...] |
The New Clearwire
admin
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Susan Crawford blog
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2008-05-09
The new Clearwire could be game-changing, but the rules of the game may not be quite as Clearwire presents them. I have been wondering since last July whether something significant would happen in the Google/Sprint world. The deal announcement earlier this weekseems to be that key development. (Here’s the press release and [...] |
Will ARIN Establish a Gatekeeper?
Milton Mueller
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IGP Blog
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2008-05-09
If you’re reading this within an hour after it was posted, you’ve got about 17 hours to comment on an important change being proposed at ARIN, the manager of Internet Protocol addresses for the North American region. ARIN is proposing a new “Policy Development Process.” (Sound familiar?) A step by step description of the proposal can be found here. The essence of the change is that the ARIN Advisory Council would manage and dispose of all policy proposals. The new PDP proposal is an example of the increasing formalization of IP address policy making. This trend, which is probably inevitable, will continue. Everyone interested in Internet governance needs to understand that and be attuned to the consequences. ARIN’s Advisory Council will become more of a gatekeeper for policy proposals. |
Tying, subsidizing, and IMS
admin
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Susan Crawford blog
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2008-05-07
In response to my post a couple of days ago about the possibility that VZ might not plan to comply with the 700 MHz “open platform” rules, someone wrote: would you have the FCC mandate that every mobile device must be capable of running every operating system? If Verizon sells me a BlackBerry, should the device [...] |